


how to fall in love with your idiot ex vampire hunter juicebox

by elliptical



Series: the most self-indulgent vampire AU of all time [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Background Polyamory, Bipolar Ronan Lynch, Dom Adam Parrish, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Scars, Self-Destruction, Slow Burn, Some Sexy Nonsense Also It's Not All Horrifically Sad I Swear, Sub Ronan Lynch, Trauma, Vampire Hunters, this was supposed to be sexy nonsense and then feelings happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 11:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20563883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: The problem, Adam discovered the following Saturday, was that Vampire Adam and Rational Adam had aligned interests in exactly one thing: destroying Ronan Lynch.





	how to fall in love with your idiot ex vampire hunter juicebox

**Author's Note:**

> so i'm cursed  
i'm 6k words into an pynchsey smutfic for this verse set after this and they haven't even taken their clothes off yet  
so i was like "oh i'll write a quick 2k oneshot to put up between them that's fast and easy"  
then it became 5k words instead
> 
> warnings for ronan-typical self destruction, adam-typical tragic backstory
> 
> this starts immediately after part 1 of this series, but it's recapped well enough in here that you don't need to read part 1 to understand this

If you’d asked Adam Parrish where he expected to wake up on any given weekend, the _last_ place he’d answer was Ronan Lynch’s bedroom.

Adam had kept a careful distance from Ronan in the time they’d known each other. He was, at least when his mind was functioning properly, aware that Ronan wasn’t a danger to him, despite Ronan's previously questionable status. If Ronan wanted him hurt for being a monster, he would already be hurt. And Ronan exhibited no malice toward Blue, who had no qualms about showing her vampire strength, and had at one point thrown Ronan’s body so hard into the wall of Monmouth Manufacturing that there was still a dent in the plaster.

(Gansey had been too worried for Ronan’s immediate safety to be into it, as far as Adam knew. For Adam’s part, he excused himself very quickly, trusting the others to put it down to the _vampire_ kind of thirst and not… well, the non-vampire kind of thirst. Adam didn’t know whether he’d been more attracted to Ronan cursing on the floor or Blue with the smuggest grin he’d ever seen, but either way he had to dunk himself in the river a half mile away.)

It wasn’t just that Ronan had, once upon a time, been a vampire hunter. Provided there wasn’t any trickery involved, Adam could take Ronan in a fight with a hand tied behind his back. And Ronan was too principled for the trickery that made hunters successful. The bigger problem was that the Vampire Demon part of Adam liked to fantasize about cracking Ronan’s spine like a twig. These thoughts also sometimes plagued him with Gansey, but they tended to subside after he and Gansey had kissed for a while, which was something Adam was _not_ in the mood to unpack.

So Adam had kept his distance. Aside from the things he had to do, like be friendly with Ronan because Gansey loved him and Adam loved Gansey, and because Blue tolerated Ronan and Adam loved Blue. And if he enjoyed Ronan Lynch’s company himself, the two of them could be friends, sort of, if not Best Buds Forever.

He shouldn’t have come over last night. It hadn’t even been an emergency; Ronan could get any mechanic to fix the BMW at any time. Adam had _known_ he wasn’t safe. The hunger was a live thing in his chest, his gut, his throat, clawing at his spine. The longer he went without feeding, the more the Vampire Demon eclipsed his Rational Brain, until eventually Rational Brain threw in the towel because it was too exhausted to keep fighting.

Paranoia had driven him to accept the invitation. He’d thought, somehow, that Ronan would know he was starving if he didn’t. That he was hunkering down locked in the tiny coffin of a church apartment so he wouldn’t hurt anyone, like he’d done a million times before. It was irrational -- Ronan would have assumed Adam just didn’t fucking like him, especially if Adam leaned into that angle -- but rational thought was harder to come by when the Vampire Demon wanted to hiss at everything.

So Adam woke up in Ronan’s bed, and before the blur of yesterday could resolve itself into coherent memory, there was just one thought in his head: _Oh, God, I killed him._

But no -- he couldn’t have -- he hadn’t -- what _had_ happened? He could remember a good chunk, at least. Ronan had cut his hand by accident, and the hunger had hit Adam like a punch to the throat, made worse for how unexpected it was. And he’d held it together, and Ronan had given him donated blood, and then Ronan had let Adam _bite_ him, and then --

He couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t he remember?

He covered his eyes with his hand and inhaled through his mouth, a short gasp. Okay. Okay, if Ronan was dead, he wasn’t gonna find out by peeking around corners and over mattresses. If he was about to find Ronan’s body broken and drained, his eyes wouldn’t tell him first. He didn’t think he could handle it. He’d get the smell of blood and death from the air and pinpoint the corpse, warn himself first. In a minute. Just a minute.

“You playing peek-a-boo, Parrish?”

The rush of relief was so powerful, Adam wanted to kiss him.

Ronan was standing in or near the doorway; Adam could tell that much from the voice, but he was unwilling to remove his hand from his eyes. Blue would have been able to pinpoint Ronan’s location well enough to hunt him blind, but Adam’s hearing hadn’t been that good for a few years.

“Your eyes _can’t_ be killing you, there’s no fucking lights on,” Ronan snapped, but Adam thought he could detect an undercurrent of concern. “Unless you’ve managed to draw the shit straw by getting chronic bloodsucker migraines or some fuckshit.”

“It’s the short straw.”

“Only if you’re a coward.”

Ronan didn’t sound any worse for wear than he usually did, but Adam had to get it out of the way before he looked. “Are you murdered?”

“Nah. Not even undead. I’m fine.” There was a pause. “What about you?”

Adam peeked through his fingers, lowered his hand with a shaky exhale. Ronan looked like he always did: jeans and a tank top, the strap of said tank top half-covering a taped patch of gauze on his shoulder, eyes glittering in the moonlight streaming through the window. Adam wondered for a moment whether he could get away without a proper conversation, then decided biting the bullet was necessary. He had to know.

“I don’t remember what happened,” he admitted. His voice came out small, and he hated it, wanted to bite the words back.

“Oh. Jesus. Okay.” Ronan passed a hand over his shaved head, for a moment looking lost for words. “Can I come sit, or are we gonna ‘guys being dudes’ this from opposite sides of the room?”

Adam’s voice shot through two octaves. “Did we _fuck?”_

“No!” Ronan held up his hands, a gesture of surrender. “Nothing like that, I wouldn’t -- _Jesus,_ Adam. You were fucked up like someone having a bad trip crossed with a murder fantasy, so I got you blood, and then I let you bite me. That’s it. Relax.”

Adam wasn’t feeling relaxed. “I remember all that. I mean after.”

“After?”

“After I bit you. I blacked out, I don’t remember.”

_”Oh.”_ Adam was ready to go off on Ronan for the way he laughed, then, but he explained, “You didn’t black out, you passed out. Real rude about it, too. Didn’t even roll off me first.” Ronan shrugged a shoulder. “I carried you in here because the mattress has less of a vendetta against the human spine than the couch. You slept. That’s it.”

Adam processed this and felt the tension leak away from him in inches, only aware of how tight his muscles had been coiled when his jaw stopped aching. “I don’t have a human spine.”

“Vampire spine, then. What the fuck ever.” Adam only realized he’d never responded to Ronan’s query about sitting when he leaned against the doorframe. “Saturdays still good?”

“I can’t--”

“Do I have to pull the Gansey card again? Because I’ll pull the Gansey card again.”

Most of the time, Adam felt less likely to hurt Gansey than Ronan. Gansey didn’t light the same slow burn under his skin, at least when Adam could touch him and make the Vampire Demon purr and back off. But last night, Ronan had told him, _If it had been Gansey with you and not me, he’d be dead._ The words were seared into Adam’s brain despite the haze of pain and too-sharp hunger surrounding them, because they were true.

He tried not to sound defeated when he said, “Saturday. I can do… seventy-five dollars a week, maybe a hundred if I’m careful, I--”

“I’m not taking your money.”

“I don’t take charity.”

“Yeah, well, I’m the one percent. I’m already robbing the working class by existing. This is me giving back. Deal with it.”

Everything about that was so brazenly offensive to Adam’s principles that he didn’t even know where to begin. The end result was that Ronan got away with it, and Adam thought, _I’ll get him back for it on Saturday,_ and then he mentally smacked the Vampire Demon with a newspaper. _Stop._

\---

The problem, Adam discovered the following Saturday, was that Vampire Adam and Rational Adam had aligned interests in exactly one thing: destroying Ronan Lynch.

Control wasn’t part of the problem. Adam valued consent above just about everything in the world, and he wasn’t hungry enough to have forgotten that. There was no doubt in his mind that he could bite Ronan without hurting him. Which actually put his biggest fear to rest.

It was just that the Vampire Demon really wanted to pin Ronan to the ground and bite along his shoulders until he was shuddering apart under Adam’s fingers, and the Rational Brain was not as horrified by this as it should have been. Also, Adam couldn’t take a cold shower at the Barns without explaining why he needed a cold shower immediately before the biting.

He could have repressed the thoughts like any self-respecting monster having an existential crisis, except Ronan seemed determined to make it difficult.

Ronan was sitting up on the bed because, as he put it, _I’m not dragging your ass in here a second time if you pass out._ He was also shirtless, which was not necessary given that a tank top could be easily maneuvered for shoulder access, but Ronan was apparently trying to kill Adam without a stake. Adam leaned across Ronan’s chest and braced a hand against his bicep to steady himself. Ronan’s heartbeat was a thrum against his arm.

“You gonna get on with it, or is this a pre-meal ‘appreciating the meat’ ritual--”

Adam bit him to shut him up.

It wasn’t his finest moment. It was, he thought later, not the kind of thing _Gansey_ would have done. If Gansey had been a bloodsucking creature of the night instead of a human too interested in bloodsucking creatures of the night.

So it was perhaps not _entirely_ Ronan’s fault that Ronan reacted like he did. The reaction being a shuddering spasm and an arch of his back and a whispered, _”Fuck,”_ like a benediction, a blasphemous prayer.

He was going to _kill_ Adam.

Adam needed to submerge himself at the bottom of the ocean for about ten million years. He did not do this, though. He did not even bite Ronan a second time to see how he’d react to _that,_ which he felt was a miracle of self-restraint. Instead, he kept his fingers curled tightly around Ronan’s arm (to hold him still so he wouldn’t get injured, a normal vampire thing, not an interest, shut up) and drank and pretended Ronan didn’t smell unbelievably tempting in more ways than one.

The relief hit him with the same dizzying rush that it had last time. Adam hadn’t expected that. Last time had been a fluke, a high produced by starvation and survival instincts. Blue didn’t lose it every time she drank from a human. But then again, Blue’s body wasn’t trying to make up for a lifetime of constant hunger. Adam supposed he had some catching up to do.

He slid his tongue over the bite as he finished drinking. It was just to help the wound close, but Ronan hissed another curse that made the action feel filthy. Fine. Two could play that game. Adam didn’t know if it was the vampire or the irrational-rational side that possessed him to release Ronan’s arm, slide his thumb along Ronan’s jaw instead, lock their gazes, and lick the blood off his own elongated teeth.

Ronan’s eyes rolled back a little, which was gratifying. At least Adam was killing him, too.

“You--” Ronan’s voice came out hoarse; he cleared it. “You going to sleep?”

“Mmm.” Adam stretched like a cat and splayed out, his brain already shutting down thanks to muzzy sedation and endorphins. “Yep.”

“Cool.” Ronan swung his legs off the bed. “I gotta get a shower.”

Adam rolled over to muffle his laughter into the pillows.

\---

Six weeks into the arrangement, Ronan discovered Adam’s scar.

To call it “a scar” was an understatement without being an understatement. It was, technically, one scar, because it was an unbroken stretch of tissue that had been caused by a single injury. However, it was also a blanket of raised, knotted awfulness that stretched across most of his lower back, his left hip, and part of his left thigh.

He hadn’t bitten Ronan yet. The two of them had been doing this… Thing, unspoken, capital-T, where they laid on Ronan’s mattress and idly held each other for a few minutes before Adam fed. Adam was sure that if he brought it up, he’d ruin it, because Ronan would say something shitty about letting Adam smell the bouquet before he drank the wine, and Adam would snap back that it wasn’t about that, jackass, and Ronan would say _then what is it about,_ and then Adam would have to make this whatever-it-was meaningless and transactional again.

He didn’t want to. He also didn’t want to make the whatever-it-was meaningful on paper or out loud, so he was going to roll with this until it didn’t work anymore.

Ronan had an arm around his waist, his eyes closed. It comforted Adam that Ronan had even fewer excuses than he did for getting touchy-feely before Adam used him as a juice box.

Then Ronan’s fingers brushed his back.

Not a violation -- an accident. Adam’s shirt had rucked up under his ribs somewhere in the process of laying down. And it wasn’t like he’d been weird about his back; setting weird boundaries was the fastest way to make people wonder why. But he still went rigid as the pads of Ronan’s fingertips pressed against the roughened skin. His breathing stopped.

Ronan drew his hand away immediately when he felt the reaction. There was a wariness to it that Adam hated, because it wasn’t even the vampire brain that had frozen him. Then Ronan asked, blunt as ever, “The fuck is that?”

Adam paused, debating how much to say. Gansey had found the scar months ago, and his horrified pity had caused a fight that left Adam feeling itchy for weeks. It had been a full month before he’d let Gansey touch him again, and that pause might have been indefinite if Gansey hadn’t made the effort to _communicate_ with him.

Adam was pretty sure that if Ronan Lynch pitied him now, he wasn’t gonna apologize later.

“Holy water,” he said finally, because failing to explain would drag the conversation out for no reason, and he wanted to have it over with. “Messed up my left ear, too, but most people can’t tell because, y’know, vampire. It was ages ago, and I’m not talking about it, so don’t ask.”

He had the urge to hide his face in Ronan’s neck or bite his shoulder or roll over so he wouldn’t have to watch Ronan’s expression. But that would have conveyed vulnerability he didn’t want to show, so he settled for eerie and unblinking. A furrow appeared in Ronan’s brow; a muscle in his cheek twitched, the corner of his mouth jumping, a microexpression that might have gone unnoticed if Adam hadn’t been studying him. Rage.

For an awful moment, Adam thought this was it; he was going to lose this. He’d always known he would eventually, but now he felt like he was losing more than a steady blood supply, even if he couldn’t pinpoint _what_ the loss was, and _fuck,_ he was remembering why he’d been too stubborn for a donor all these years.

Then Ronan exhaled, the tension going out of his body. Adam had seen the anger on his face. He knew it still had to be boiling through Ronan’s veins. Putting that anger away was a conscious choice, one Adam didn’t think he’d ever seen Ronan make.

The corner of Ronan’s mouth curved upward, just a hint of his usual shark smile. _"Badass,_ Parrish.”

Adam laughed, surprise and relief making the sound lighter than he expected. Ronan had defused his anxiety in two words. There wasn’t any reason for it; there were, in fact, plenty of reasons Ronan could have gnawed on the scar issue like a dog with a bone. Adam couldn’t think of why he wouldn’t unless it had been for Adam’s sake alone.

Which brought another feeling. _Oh no._

Because Adam wasn’t used to people caring, or anything being simple. Blue and Gansey had helped ease him into the kiddie pool instead of tossing him into the deep end, but Adam was apparently selfish enough that two people giving a shit about him wasn’t enough. This thing, this feeling, he wanted to chase it. Wanted more of it.

He wanted Ronan Lynch.

God _dammit._

\---

Nine weeks into the arrangement, Adam arrived at the Barns to find Ronan at the epicenter of a self-destructive hurricane.

He could hear crashing and cursing from inside before he even stepped onto the porch. He also couldn’t hear any scuffling of feet or breathing patterns that would indicate the presence of another person. Ronan was alone. If he was fighting anyone, it was just himself.

Given the circumstances, Adam let himself in the front door without knocking. Ronan hadn’t locked it. He scented the air before he moved through the kitchen, searching out blood. There were small traces of metal in the air, but nothing that would indicate a 911-level emergency. Adam took half a second to marvel at how much less the scent of blood ruined his head lately; the vampire in him lifted its head curiously, decided it was getting fed soon either way, and settled down like a cat in a patch of sunlight.

Then he went to find Ronan. Vampire echolocation remained elusive, but his hearing was good enough to lead him to the living room. 

Ronan had turned the place into a post-apocalyptic disaster. Adam couldn’t see a single thing that was intact. The bookshelves that broke down easily had been rent apart, shelves hurled in every direction, walls dinged where the corners had smacked. A spiderwebbing crack wrapped through the center of one of the windows. Books were everywhere, laid on their sides or bent into unnatural shapes, torn pages littering the floor while their empty spines drooped sadly on the ground. The trinkets that the wall shelves housed had crashed to the floor, jagged shards and a fine powder of broken glass too ground into the carpeting to avoid.

Ronan had his back to Adam. If he’d noticed the door opening, he hadn’t acknowledged it. Probably he hadn’t noticed at all, though, given that he was very focused on punching through the plaster. His knuckles were dark with blood. Adam couldn’t see the soles of his bare feet, but there were enough little smudges of red on the carpet for him to surmise that Ronan had trod in the glass.

“Ronan,” he said. Weeks ago, Ronan had used his first name to pull him back from a precipice. Adam could do the same now.

Ronan paused. The wall had about six ragged holes through it. Adam surmised that once Ronan had run out of items to break, he’d gone for the house itself.

“Hey, Parrish,” he said without turning around. His body was thrumming with so much coiled energy that Adam could feel it from across the room. “Is it ten already?”

“It sure is,” Adam confirmed. “And I’m sure as hell not biting you like this.”

Ronan uncurled his fist, the movement stiff, like he wasn’t sure anymore how to move his fingers. His knuckles were raw, the blood smeared across the unmarred back of his hand. Adam didn’t know how to tell if the bones were broken. Blue would know. He was pretty sure he should call her, and he was definitely sure he should call Gansey, but calming Ronan down was priority number one.

“Don’t have to bite me,” Ronan said. The edge in his voice was not his usual bite. The usual bite was all posturing, a calculated choice about appearance. This, on the other hand, didn’t sound like a timbre he could control. “I did all the work. You’re welcome.”

Adam didn’t take the bait. “You know what I meant.”

“I don’t think I fucking do. What, you think there’s not enough blood left in my body? You wanna lick it off the fucking floor? Go ahead.”

This sentiment didn’t rattle Adam the way it might have if Ronan had been stable. Ronan could aim words with precision cruelty, and he’d managed to shred every relationship he had until all that was left was Gansey and Blue and Adam. Adam knew this already. He also knew that Ronan didn’t bother with cruelty unless he wanted to break his edges on other people.

“Did you take anything?” Adam asked.

“I don’t do fucking drugs. Booze is what’s up. Kills you faster.” Ronan’s breath hitched around something that might have been a laugh or a scream. “What, a guy can’t want to -- want to wreck a few things without --” He was having trouble putting words together; he turned and hurled his fist at the wall again.

Adam was at his side almost immediately, catching his arm on the backswing. Ronan snarled like a wild thing, pulling against him. Adam said, “If you sit down and stop hitting things, I’ll let you go.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m not,” Adam said mildly. It was curious; he would have expected the situation to trigger his need to hide and collapse and make everything quiet. But Ronan wasn’t hurting anyone except himself. Slinking away like a kicked dog would just leave him to keep hurting himself, which Adam could not tolerate. It was a new thing to add to his list of intolerables.

“Bullshit.”

“I’m giving you a choice. We can stand here, and I can hold onto you, or you can sit down.”

Ronan’s chest heaved, sharp, three times. Adam counted. Then he said, “I can’t sit down.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“I just fucking can’t.”

“You’re having a manic episode.” This wasn’t an insult, nor was it a theory. Just an observation. Ronan was far from secretive about his issues, wearing them on his wrists and daring anyone to say a word. Adam knew that Gansey had lost plenty of sleep worrying about him, that Gansey was the only one who knew how to soothe him when he got like this.

“I’m not fucking _manic,_ Jesus fucking hell shitbucket on a bumper sticker, I’m just going too fast. Shut up. Shut up, preemptively. Shut the fuck up.”

“That is pretty much the definition of mania, yeah,” Adam agreed.

“I said shut up. God. Can you bite me? Just -- Jesus, pretend I didn’t ask it like that. Not needy, just -- Adam, _please.”_

“I’m not helping you self-medicate. That’s not what I’m here for.” Despite the blood-scent clogging his throat, Adam didn’t think he’d ever felt _less_ inclined to bite Ronan. “I’ll let go if you promise not to punch the wall again.”

Something in Ronan loosened. “Fine.”

Adam let him go.

Ronan stood still for about ten seconds. Adam truly wasn’t sure whether he was about to go for the wall again or not. Then he said, “I’m sitting,” and let his legs fold under him, dropping to the ground.

Adam sat down beside him. “I’m gonna call Gansey, okay?”

Ronan dragged his injured hand across his face, leaving a smear of blood over his cheekbone. “Don’t fucking do that.”

“Why not?”

“He can’t see --” Ronan broke off. “Don’t call him. You can drive me to Monmouth in a minute. I just need to breathe for one fucking second.”

Adam nodded. Ronan didn’t want Gansey seeing the destruction of the house, which he supposed was fair. The shame of it would burn in Ronan’s chest like the shame of Adam’s hunger did for him.

Ronan was silent, save the ragged pitch of his breathing, for the next hundred and eighty seconds, but Adam wasn’t going to quibble about the definition of time. Then he said, “Talk to me. Distract me. I’m not gonna ask you to bite me again, I’m not -- my shit’s all out of order.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” Adam racked his brain trying to come up with a plausible distraction. Nothing that would remind Ronan of the chaos around them, nothing that would remind him about being bitten, nothing that would remind him of Gansey or being cared about. Cars were too shallow, everything else was too deep. He finally landed on, “Do you want to see my scar?”

Ronan glanced at him, then down at his bloody knuckles. His eyes were still aflame. Adam didn’t doubt that his body was crying out to continue the destructive path like Adam’s cried to hunt, but Ronan was trying, and that counted for something. Counted for a lot, actually.

“The holy water scar?”

“That’s the one.”

Ronan muttered something under his breath. It would’ve been unintelligible to a human, but Adam was pretty sure he made out “want to see every inch of you.” He ignored that, glad when Ronan gave him a, “Yeah,” which he could work with.

When Adam had thought about taking his shirt off for Ronan, none of the scenarios in his head had ever gone quite like this. It was probably a bad idea. When Ronan was a blade, the last thing you wanted to do was hand him a wound to widen. But at the same time, Adam didn’t think any cruel response would touch him right now. He was, for once, focused fully outside himself.

He pulled his shirt off and twisted so Ronan could see. His jeans he left, the scar tissue disappearing beneath the waistband. Despite himself, his shoulders were tense. He would have heard the telltale movement of a body poised for violence, but some habits were hard to break.

Then the soft press of skin on skin. Not where he expected it. Ronan’s breath fanned between his shoulderblades, forehead pressed to the nape of Adam’s neck.

“You know what I don’t fucking get, Parrish?” he asked. “You live in a _church._ How did anyone fuck you up with holy water?”

“Used to believe in God.” This was, by and large, a fact that Adam considered an embarrassing secret of his past, a childhood phase he’d outgrown. It was also not something he was prepared to discuss non-offensively with a devout Catholic. “Got over it. One less thing to have power over me.”

Ronan was quiet. His breathing eased slowly, shifting from the rapid gasp of the dying to the slower rhythm of an average person doing average things. There was still enough energy inside him for a fine tremor to be shivering along his skin; Adam felt through his neck. But he was, at least, taking back control of the little things he could.

Adam was about to suggest they leave for Monmouth when Ronan asked, “Did my dad do it?”

The question surprised Adam. It wasn’t a surprise that Ronan would struggle with the harm that had been inflicted, or that it would eat at him with guilt, or that he’d wonder _would I have done that could I have done that on a different path._ The surprising part was how literal the connection was.

“No,” Adam said, and turned around so he was facing Ronan. He laid his hand gently on Ronan’s cheek. Ronan closed his eyes. “Why would you think it was your dad?”

Besides the obvious, he guessed. Niall Lynch had hunted vampires, probably with holy water; Adam happened to be a vampire who’d been burned with holy water. But there were plenty of other people who knew how to use these sorts of weapons.

“I get these fucking nightmares,” Ronan said. “Never mind.”

“Nightmares?” Adam ran his thumb over Ronan’s lower lip without thinking about it. It was not meant to be a sensual movement, but Ronan’s jaw went slack. “About your dad?”

“About you and my dad.”

Oh. Adam let out a soft sigh, understanding and wishing he didn't. “I never met your dad. He never hurt me. Cross my heart.”

Unhappiness sparked from Ronan. Adam wanted to hold him forever, but he also wanted to get Ronan somewhere safe first. With time, Adam could become an expert at handling episodes like this, but for now, he wanted Ronan with the two people who actually _were_ experts.

“It’s better that he’s dead, right?” Ronan said. “He was a piece of shit, right?”

There was no right answer to that question. There was the answer Adam believed -- a resounding _yes_ \-- but any answer spoken aloud would be a wrong one. At least as far as not hurting Ronan worse was concerned.

Instead, Adam said, “Let’s head to Monmouth. I’ll play mediator with the Gansey mothering if you want.”

Ronan’s eyes flicked to Adam’s mouth, then back up. Adam didn’t know if he was thinking about kissing or biting. Certainly Adam himself was thinking about kissing Ronan, but now wasn’t the time, not when he was fucked up and hurt and grieving. Some things were more important.

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “Yeah, fuck. Okay.”


End file.
